I’ve always been a cautious shopper, but, depending on the item, a few hours’ worth of research is generally more than enough for me to make up my mind.  Now new data indicates that most people take much longer – and, indeed, are taking increasing amounts of time – to make online purchasing choices.

Sales, online and off, are closed when the customer trusts the seller. To that end, how far does including live chat in the online sales and checkout process go toward sealing the deal? Numbers are coming in, and they’re looking good.

Though retail sites get about a quarter of their traffic from search engines, they are also increasingly getting traffic from MySpace, perhaps answering some reservations posed about the efficacy of creating a presence in social networks.

If there’s a wicked storm going on (like the one raging outside the WebProNews offices at this very moment), then expect your online store to see a spike in activity.

Being able to research products online is important to retail shoppers. Ninety-one percent of online shoppers said it was "important" or "very important" for retailers to offer in- depth product information online according to WebCollage’s 2007 "Survey of Online Consumer Product Research Habits."

The number of people who shop online continues to grow with 48 percent of consumers saying they have increased shopping online "a great deal" or "somewhat" in the past five years, according to a survey sponsored by RightNow Technologies conducted by Harris Interactive.

Eight in 10 consumers who had a preference said they would spend more online if they had a safe substitute to credit cards, according to Javelin Strategy and Research’s "2007 Annual Javelin Consumer Payment Poll".

Retail stores promote ordering items on their Web sites and then offer consumers the option of quickly being able to pick the item up.

A new survey from Accenture finds that the majority of U.S. consumers use the Internet to research products but prefer to make their purchases offline.

Consumers Research Products Online,Buy Offline

If you’re going to do some car research, odds are good that you’ll be doing it online.  A new study indicates that consumers are turning to the web more than ever – and they’re turning, more specifically, to manufacturers’ websites.  “Offline” resources, by comparison, seem to be dwindling in terms of importance.

On average, online retailers still only convert two to three percent of visitors into buyers. Though people are buying more online than ever before, that number has remained consistent over the last three years.

The three percent conversion average is also consistent across studies by different organizations, according to e-Marketer. That means that 97 percent of shoppers still prefer to buy offline.

As expected, shopping online continues to rise year over year, up four percent in total. Nielsen//NetRatings reports that from the end of October this year through the first week of December, the metrics company’s Holiday eShopping Index grew by 43 percent.

I might have mentioned the advantage of spending Black Friday online (or waiting for Cyber Monday) to certain crack-of-dawn-rising family members if not for the tryptophan coma my mother caused, and for the fact that it was 3 a.m. This Internet shopping thing, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, is catching on, even if this rise-and-shop ritual is still strongly in play.

The rapidly approaching Thanksgiving holiday in the United States will be swiftly followed by “Black Friday,” with shoppers heading out to begin dispersing parts of their credit card limits to retailers.

Expect this online holiday shopping season to be a blockbuster as 80 percent of American Internet users will purchase gifts online, according to a Zogby International poll commissioned by AOL. New York City will lead the rest, more than doubling the spend of the nearest market.

Online retailers, you have four seconds to get your site loaded before a would-be customer scoots off to a competitor. Add that to what we already know about the time it takes to make a judgment once a page is loaded, and the window of opportunity becomes narrower.

Online shopping search engine, Smarter.com, has announced a cool new feature: Visual Search Beta. Aimed at those shopping for clothing, Visual Search allows shoppers to select a type of clothing, then search by color using a color-wheel. It’s hard to explain, but easier to demonstrate.

In this article, I am going to be talking about some new studies and reports that have been made available. I do not want to bore you with a bunch of numbers and statistics, but sometimes by looking at the numbers, we can realize certain areas that we can improve on for online businesses and realize areas that we do well in. We can give ourselves a big pat on the back and feel good about ourselves.

It won’t be long until the average Internet user isn’t so average. As teenagers, a demographic that has little or no memory of life before the Web, grow into adults, the world of e-commerce will expand to levels heretofore unrealized (or dreamed).

comScore and Google have released a new study – “The Role of Search in Consumer Buying” – which examined holiday related purchases to see which completed online and which offline.

I caught up with Alan Rimm-Kaufman at SES in NYC who asked me to share with you an effort that is underway to bring some kind of standardization to online shopping datafeeds.